Dead Storms and Literature's New Horizon: The 2020 Neustadt Prize Lecture

During the Neustadt Prize ceremony on October 21, 2020, David Bellos read the English language version of Kadare’s prize lecture to a worldwide Zoom audience.

- Ismail Kadare

Iam happy and honored that the ceremony organized in honor of my being awarded the Neustadt Prize coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the prize.

There is no shortage of questions about literature. We hear questions such as, Does the world need literature? This question would call to mind clichéd TV-show questions, trying to stir up debate, had it not been already raised thousands of years ago. There have obviously been two parties lobbying over this question, for and against literature.

Literature was born along with a denial, a barrier. Even if at first this seems strange, if we think about the questions, we will reach the conclusion that this negation is somehow befitting of literature, and it is even quite natural. Literature and negation are one and the same. Rather than being born of angels, literature is the handiwork of demons.

Let’s look at things more simply. Literature, in the form of early oral poetry, has often had as its subject matter the return from long travels: telling of what happened there, at the far border of a country, the desert, or death itself. The first travelers coming from afar were practically the first writers. Walking back to their countries, in the solitude of the road, their minds reconstructed events in such a way that they would be most interesting to listeners. Thus, along the way, dialogues emerged, events became more exciting, colors grew brighter, and something was emphasized while something else erased.